Last Call: Give Me a Ring
Rocca, Francis X.
LAST CALL Francis X. Rocca Give Me a Ring WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN, I MUST CONFESS, I BRIEFLY wore a mood ring. The year was 1977, and if mood rings had ever been in any sense fashionable, that time...
...MY DECISION IN THE END WASN'T BASED ON principle, aesthetic or moral...
...I may have been unconsciously hoping to sort out the tangled feelings of pubescence, but that proved too much to expect of a five-dollar piece of jewelry...
...They see I'm a businessman, figure I'm single...
...The band was made of a light silvery metal and didn't quite close in the back, so one size fit all...
...Another of my colleagues sees this as a point in favor...
...I NEVER WORE A RING AGAIN UNTIL LAST JUNE, when my wife slipped a slender gold band onto the fourth finger of my left hand, in the presence of family, friends, and a Roman Catholic priest...
...Well," he would admit, with obvious reluctance, "the thing moves...
...I bought mine in a motel gift shop during a family trip to Canada, drawing on my special vacation allowance...
...ARE YOU KIDDING...
...MY DAD, WHO MARRIED IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY, wears a wedding band...
...Now, after nearly four decades of incremental weight gain, he says he couldn't lose it even if he tried...
...It hadn't been inevitable that ours would be a "double ring" ceremony (which I used to think meant the nuptial version of double dating, ideally between sets of identical twins—something I must have seen on some long-forgotten sitcom...
...A wedding band seemed a talisman against such perils...
...IT'S A TOTAL CHICK magnet," declared another friend when I shared my reasoning with her...
...Hearing this, I envisioned the temptations awaiting me, and felt already guilty...
...Only recently in this country, good taste reserved wedding rings for brides...
...That's inspiring, as well as daunting—as is the simple thought of its significance...
...I respect their bold understatement, not least for its anachronism...
...74 September 1999 • The American Spectator...
...Several of them are friends of mine...
...Now, of course, just about every man wears one...
...Jewelry on men was held to be gaudy, effeminate, "ethnic...
...Not even when you wash your hands before dinner...
...Playing basketball is one, or so my boss tells me...
...But I haven't picked up a basketball in over twenty years, so that's not much of a consideration...
...by afternoon it could fly off during an especially strenuous wave...
...I suppose that makes it, too, a mood ring of a kind...
...It seems to grow or shrink according to the time of day: First thing in the morning it digs into the flesh...
...A husband in the market for an affair, it seems, can find no better accessory...
...Wedding rings are very sexy...
...I've never seen anyone with such a mark, but the sight must be sadder than a missing limb...
...It soon landed in a dresser drawer, along with my other major souvenir of the summer, a fake lapis lazuli bolo...
...Whatever divorce rates may be doing, it takes an awful lot of faith these days to plan on wearing anything for the rest of your life...
...But doesn't it get dirty underneath...
...Never mind that strange women in airports had not exactly been swarming me before I got married...
...I'm not a surgeon or a magician, either—two professions that presumably make fingerwear impractical...
...SOME SAY A MAN'S WEDDING RING NOT ONLY advertises his marital status but, in so doing, helps preserve it...
...It is also the case with those who seek out married men just because they can't possess them...
...As soon as I mention my wife and kids, that's the end of that...
...A friend of mine who wears his intermittently told me that it's only when he goes without that women try to pick him up: "It's usually in the frequent flyer lounge...
...Everybody knows married men live longer and make more money...
...He swore it never, ever came off...
...Yet there remain a few holdouts loath to compromise on their aesthetic principles...
...No sir...
...My wife hails from a country where all married men wear wedding rings...
...Sometimes I catch my reflection in a mirror, and notice that the ring makes me look older, somehow, practically adult...
...This is not only true, insisted my friend {happily married, by the way), of women trying to rob others of their husbands...
...THERE ARE OF COURSE CERTAIN THINGS YOU should not do with a ring on...
...I imagined the possibilities and felt guilty all over again...
...So now there is a bit of precious metal on my hand which I play with all the time, compulsively, though not (I hope) as morbidly as Captain Queeg with his two little metal balls...
...While blocking an opponent's shot, you could easily cut his face...
...He'd have to cut it off, I guess, and leave a pinkish indentation all around the finger...
...As someone who spends lots of time at the keyboard, I wonder, might a ring aggravate repetitive stress injuries from typing...
...Not for the last time, I suspect, I gave in to her wishes...
...she just assumed that I would go along...
...Plus, it means at least one woman's checked you out and decided you're not a complete disaster...
...The stone changed color as promised—from blue to green to ochre and back to blue—but it was hard to see any correlation with my emotional state...
...The year was 1977, and if mood rings had ever been in any sense fashionable, that time was already passed...
...Wide as the paper strip around a cigar, glittering incongruously on his virile, hairy hand, it used to fascinate me as a child...
Vol. 32 • September 1999 • No. 9
